Congress Enacting Most U.S. Laws Since '60s Gets No Respect

By Laura Litvan and James Rowley -
Sep 17, 2010

The 111th Congress returned to
Washington this week with a record of legislative achievement
that rivals President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society.” Voters
may show their thanks by throwing lawmakers out of office.

Encouraged by Barack Obama, a new president from their own
party, the Democrat-led House of Representatives and Senate
provided health-care coverage for another 32 million Americans,
offering coverage for 95 percent of U.S. residents. Their $814
billion stimulus bill created or saved 3.3 million jobs,
according to the Congressional Budget Office.

New laws rescued the financial industry from the worst
collapse since the Great Depression as well as thousands of
property owners from foreclosure with $4 billion of aid. And,
for the first time, consumers have federal protection from
opaque lending practices that caused the real estate crash.

Obama achieved his goals with a narrower majority than
Johnson had in Congress, and Obama also has failed to convince a
majority of voters that Congress has done enough to make life
better for them. Polls show Republican gains in Nov. 2
congressional elections to the extent that the Democrats may
lose their House and Senate majorities.

“Nothing the Democrats could possibly do is likely to
alter the basic course of this election,” said David Rohde, a
political scientist at Duke University in Durham, North
Carolina. “The things that are mainly affecting voters
Democrats can’t do anything about.”

“Historically, it’s going to rank as one of the most
productive Congresses in recent time, comparable to LBJ’s first
two years, and maybe even Franklin Roosevelt’s time” when
Social Security was created, said Thurber, editor of a 2004 book
“The Battle for Congress: Consultants, Candidates and Voters.”

Pay Equity

Congress also passed laws to help ensure pay equity,
enabling women to pursue lawsuits claiming they were underpaid,
and allowed the Food and Drug Administration to regulate the
tobacco industry, resulting in restrictions on cigarette
marketing. Lawmakers also expanded state programs for children’s
health insurance, offering coverage for an additional 3.5
million kids.

Still, Obama’s party has found little public support, as
only 33 percent of Americans surveyed by The Gallup Poll said
they approve of the job Democrats are doing in Congress. Obama’s
approval rating is below 50 percent, and polls show a lack of
public confidence in the health plan, financial overhaul and
economic stimulus.

This year, Democrats are hamstrung. Democrats’
accomplishments have been overshadowed by voters’ concerns about
the economy, soaring deficits and a 9.6 percent U.S.
unemployment rate. Much of what was enacted won’t be felt for a
long time, and Obama also has failed to create a convincing
narrative of the accomplishments for the public, analysts say.

‘Basic Course’

The House and Senate, which returned to Washington this
week after a month’s summer break, plan to finish pre-election
work by early October. Then comes a final campaign debate.

Republican Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona said Democrats
haven’t gained politically because Obama and Congress have gone
“far beyond where the American people are in terms of expansion
of government,” spending money and increasing debt. “This is a
major sea change in policy, and the American people have reacted
very badly to it,” he said.

With health-care, Democrats “knew we had an historic
opportunity to be there with Social Security, Medicare,” House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California said in a July 14 interview.
Republican attacks against her are “a sign of how effective we
have been; they want to stop that,” she said.

Democrats drove through Obama’s agenda with a far narrower
margin of control than in Johnson’s time, when the party held
the Senate 68-32 and the House by a 295-140 margin. In 1935,
when Social Security was enacted, Democrats held 69 Senate seats
and Republicans 25. Democrats controlled the House, 322 to 103.

“Any great innovations always, invariably come with a
political price,” Baker said. “Unless the payoff is immediate
and goes to all segments of the electorate, you pay a price for
it.”

Today, Democrats control 59 of 100 seats in the Senate and
255 of the 435 House seats. This year’s health-care overhaul
passed without a single Republican vote.

It is “pretty remarkable” for the Democratic-controlled
Congress “to have gotten as much as they have gotten done
without any Republican support,” said Ronald W. Peters, a
political scientist at University of Oklahoma. Yet the party
can’t look to Johnson’s time for any sense of inspiration, he
said. After their productivity in the mid-1960s, Democrats lost
47 seats in the House and four seats in the Senate in 1966.

Foremost among the new laws is the health-care legislation
that represents the biggest redesign of the U.S. medical system
since Medicare’s passage in 1965. It would force changes such as
prohibiting the denial of insurance coverage for pre-existing
conditions. The share of the legal non-elderly population with
insurance would rise to 94 percent from 83 percent.

Financial Regulations

Congress enacted new financial regulations and a consumer
protection agency intended to avert another worldwide freeze of
credit like the one in 2008 that required a $700-billion federal
bailout of Wall Street after the biggest bankruptcy in U.S.
history when Lehman Brothers failed. The plan’s $4 billion in
federal foreclosure aid includes cash advances for emergency
mortgage-relief payments for unemployed homeowners.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development has awarded
$7 billion to state and local governments to buy, renovate and
sell foreclosed homes and offer down-payment and closing aid to
buyers. Of that money, $3 billion came from the Wall Street
overhaul or the economic stimulus plan. The agency said Sept. 3
that almost 100,000 homes were affected by the program.

The financial law creates a consumer financial protection
bureau with independent authority to write and enforce rules for
banks, sets up a council of regulators to police firms for
threats to the economic system, and creates a mechanism to wind
down failing firms whose collapse would roil markets.

Congress expanded the State Children’s Health Insurance
Program to cover more than 11 million uninsured kids, up from
7.5 million in 2008, and made it easier for women to win pay-
discrimination lawsuits. That law allows employees to pursue
claims they are being underpaid because of discrimination that
occurred years earlier, undoing a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court
decision that barred such lawsuits.

After getting authority from Congress to regulate the
cigarette industry, the FDA in March banned cigarette makers
from distributing branded merchandise such as T-shirts and
sponsoring sporting or entertainment events.

Economy Still Problem

None of this has translated into broad political support
for the president’s party, analysts say.

“What they haven’t done is fix the economy,” Rohde said.
“The only way the voters can express that they are unhappy is
to vote against the party in power.”

Democrats haven’t put “the right sales pitch” on their
accomplishments, Peters said. Unlike Johnson, who told a “grand
narrative” of his program, Obama hasn’t “tied together all the
various things the Democrats have done,” he said.

Obama’s approval rating is about 46 percent, the same as
President Bill Clinton’s just before the 1994 midterm election
that gave Republicans majorities in both chambers of Congress.

Republicans won the House that year after campaigning on a
“Contract With America” that spelled out a 10-point
legislative agenda. While the new Republican-controlled House
passed nine of the measures, most, including a constitutional
amendment requiring a balanced budget, failed to get Senate
support.

This year Democrats are hamstrung by the economy, Thurber
said, and also they’ve approved legislation that’s complex and
hard to explain to voters.

“It’s very hard to communicate through the noise of a bad
economy,” Thurber said.

Little Traction

Democrats have found little traction in labeling
Republicans as pro-Wall Street for opposing the financial
overhaul. The measure so far has failed to rally public support.
A Bloomberg National Poll in July found that almost four out of
five Americans said they have just a little or no confidence
that the legislation will prevent or significantly soften a
future crisis.

A July 12 Pew survey showed that 47 percent disapproved of
the health-care law, compared with 35 percent who approved.

New Proposals

In the remaining two months before the midterm elections,
the president’s proposals to boost the economy include $50
billion for transportation projects and more tax breaks for
businesses to encourage hiring and capital investment.

Obama is pushing Congress to extend middle-income tax cuts
approved under President George W. Bush in 2001 and 2003 while
rejecting Republican calls to also extend cuts for the
wealthiest Americans. At a Sept. 11 news conference, he called
the higher-income cuts “a bad idea.”

His ability to win that fight and others is in doubt amid
division in his own party and Republican opposition.

Some Democrats say they oppose allowing any of the tax
cuts to expire at the end of this year with the economy still
lagging. Some support a temporary two-year extension of all the
cuts, an idea proposed by Obama’s former budget director, Peter Orszag, and supported by Republicans including House Minority
Leader John Boehner of Ohio.

‘Right Thing To Do’

The Senate’s second-ranking Democrat, Dick Durbin of
Illinois, said most of Congress’s achievements, such as the Wall
Street overhaul, haven’t yet had a “direct personal impact” on
voters.

“I think it’s the right thing to do for America but it
isn’t the kind of thing I expect a great vote of gratitude in
November because we passed it,” he said in an interview.

Durbin said he has “no regrets” on any of the votes
Democrats took to pass Obama’s legislative agenda. “But those
achievements were yesterday and elections are about tomorrow.”